Self Medication
by FangedPuffskein
Summary: A short look at Remus Lupin


Remus had very few early memories that didn't involve his mother in some significant manner. She was his parent, his teacher, his nursemaid and his jailor.

"Remus! Get away from there right now!" He could still see her terrified face shouting for him as he explored the meadow at the foothills of the mountain they were camping beside.

He could see her shaking hands and feel her trembling arms around his shoulders as she explained that the pretty blue rocket flowers were also called wolfsbane, and could hurt him.

Another vivid memory involved both of his parents. Age 8, on the second of November, he had tucked into a bar of chocolate he had found under the sofa while watching his Saturday lunchtime cartoons. He was five minutes into Zokko! when his mother spotted the chocolate in his hand and screamed, alerting her husband.

Remus didn't remember a lot after that, but he did remember the hospital, the doctor telling him he had quite a bad allergy, and a lock being put on a cupboard in the kitchen.

It wasn't until his third year of Hogwarts that Remus Lupin would have chocolate again, and he was astounded to realise that he didn't have an outward allergic reaction to the treat. His throat itched and a kind of fiery pain radiated through his veins for a whole day afterwards. But the pain was bearable, and he didn't get sick.

He brought a bar from Honeydukes home with him to give to his father that summer. His mother had died the year before and his father had fallen into a quiet form of depression, caring little for anything outside of his garden or his bed. He ate the chocolate himself.

He realised his chocolate addiction, which his friends joked about through their upper years at Hogwarts, had grown a little out of hand when he couldn't attend little Harry's Christening. He couldn't fit into his suit. Making excuses about being on a mission to talk to the wolves on the continent, Remus threw himself into healthy eating and avoiding temptation. The fact that Honeydukes did not export out of Europe helped.

After the disastrous Halloween of 1981, Remus lost himself in a nightmare.

The alcohol helped numb his human mind, but the muggle chocolate temporarily filled a hole inside his chest that he didn't know how to fix. The wolf in the back of his mind whimpered with every bite and Remus felt satisfied that he was controlling the beast with the only thing it understood: pain.

For the next ten years, the once well educated Remus Lupin appeared as an obese vagabond. He walked out of his father's house long before the family he chose for himself died. The loss of his best friends broke his heart. Whether dead or imprisoned on offences he would gladly unleash the feral animal within for, he could not cope alone.

His days he spent drinking, occasionally doing manual labour on farms for money, and eating as much chocolate as he could find. The nights were not any better.

His skin became waxy and grey, his eyes a permanent yellowed bloodshot. Remus Lupin was a man who hurt himself in a way no one could have expected. He ballooned to an enormous size and was soon unable to find clothes to fit him in the charity shops and salvation army donation centres. He knew something had to give.

He returned monthly, avoiding his father, to the home he grew up in. Into the garden shed, through the trapdoor in the floor and down to the underground cellar his father had made for him specifically. Locking himself inside the cage, he sat and wept, awaiting the change as the sunset on the worst year of his life so far.

Morning broke, and with it, Remus awoke to a sight that shocked him. His father sat on the floor outside of his cage, crying. "Oh son, what have you done?" Lyall Lupin turned pained eyes on his only child.

Remus tried to answer, but couldn't speak. He reached shaking hands up to his face and saw bite marks all along his arms. Frightened, he closed his eyes and let the darkness creep up over him.

He spent the next year there with his father. The wolf in his mind settled at the smell of what it called pack. The man realised he needed to change when he couldn't lift his father after the aged man had a fall.

The Lupin family, small and broken, took a year to recover. Lyall eventually recovered from his broken leg, and Remus lost weight. He would never be a thin man, but he was healthy again. He stopped drinking altogether. The scars healed over, but Remus couldn't hide them all. The most prominent being the scratch marks over his face.

Remus left the sanctuary of his father's quiet corner of the country in search of work, and he found it in a library. He had a flat of his own, worked three days a week, and did not give in to the gremlin in his head. He visited his father on a Sunday every week and stayed over on the nights of the full moon in his room under the shed.

In the morning of the second of August 1993, Remus climbed the ladder up into the shed and headed back into the house, collapsing when he found his father at the kitchen table, dead.


End file.
